The Supreme Court today threw out the June 2002 conviction of the Arthur Andersen accounting firm for destroying Enron Corp.-related documents, ruling unanimously that the jury instructions at the trial for the now-defunct company were improper.
The decision was a major defeat for the Department of Justice, which prosecuted one of the nation's largest accounting firms against the advice of numerous critics, who believed the case too weak for criminal trial.
The Andersen firm itself all but disintegrated. Many Andersen accountants and support staffers scattered to rival companies after Andersen's criminal conviction. Today, only about 200 employees perform administrative and legal duties for Andersen, which exists mainly to fight shareholder lawsuits related to its work for Enron, Global Crossing Ltd. and other clients.
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, writing for the court, said the judge's instructions to the jury were too loose, failing to require proof that Andersen "knowingly" obstructed justice.
The instructions, he said, "failed to convey the requisite consciousness of wrongdoing" on the part of Andersen and its employees. "Indeed," said Rehnquist, "it is striking how little culpability" the instructions required....
And so the administration's streak in the Enron-related cases continues. Those few cases it's brought -- this one, primarily -- it doesn't seem to win definitively, because it can't prove that the ancillary actors did anything "knowningly". And it has yet to do much of anything to people inside Enron, against whom they would seem to have more evidence of knowledgeable actions and who donated a portion of these dubiously obtained moneys to various campaigns like drunken sailors ... but let us not imply that they have purchased injustice, oh no no no! That said, at the rate these prosecutions are proceeding, nobody will remember any details of the Enron mess by the time any of the bigwigs go to trial. Which may or may not be a good thing; it will at least give a shot at a less inflamed trial.
Posted by iain at May 31, 2005 10:47 AM
